“The land is our great living classroom.” That is how Johana, a teacher at Sueños del Bosque, sums up Travesía Bosque: a holiday experience for children aged 5 to 10 that the team has been creating with families in Barichara for a year now.
Learning from those who keep the memory
In Travesía Bosque the teaching respects each child’s stage, rhythm, needs and capacity for wonder. So learning happens by going out: visiting artisans, farmers and knowledge keepers who hold Barichara’s memory, to learn their crafts, hear their stories and take inspiration from the way they live on this land.
The dialogue between generations sits at the centre of the programme. Ancestral knowledge is not presented as something from the past, but as a living way of understanding the place where the children are growing up.
The forest as teacher
The great teacher is the dry tropical forest. Johana describes it as a living community, where soil, water, plants, fungi, insects, other animals and people exist thanks to relationships of interdependence: they look after and help one another.
That is why the children do not only learn about the forest: they take part in real restoration of the dry forest at the Origen del Agua reserve. They plant, tend and come back. Something grows from that which cannot be taught on a blackboard: an emotional bond with the place, a genuine wish to protect what you begin to love.
Hands learn too
In Travesía Bosque the arts are the language for telling what was lived: weaving, modelling, painting, music, movement, storytelling. Each experience becomes a chance to create and to express. And in that making, Johana says, the children discover that hands also learn to wait, to persevere and to turn challenges into learning.
After a year, Travesía Bosque has woven an intercultural community of children, families and teachers who believe in an education that can regenerate people and places at the same time. A new generation of guardians of the dry forest is learning, quite literally, with their hands in the soil.
Image: a frame from the film. With Johana, a teacher at Sueños del Bosque.
